THE REGAL EDIT

👑 HELLO, REGAL ONES

Welcome to The Regal Edit™, your curated digest for living and leading in full alignment. Each edition distills five essentials in business, health, spirituality, lifestyle, and social impact — designed to elevate how you think, feel, and move through the world.

I, like most of the world, have been witnessing the last of the "snake's skin shed." I found myself dancing in my living room in Norway two Sundays ago as Bad Bunny's halftime show reminded us of joy. love and hope. I cried watching how Minnesota showed us the blueprint on how a community comes together to protect our neighbors. I found myself angry watching clips of Pam Bondi's lack of response and dehumanization of the Epstein victims.

We are living in a time where old systems that have been alive for centuries are doing everything they can not to crumble and they hope that our very heart, conviction, and energy simply tires out.

This exhaustion is the strategy.

Political scientist Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority, outlines what he calls competitive authoritarianism—a system where democratic institutions technically exist, but are so manipulated and weakened that they no longer function fairly. It's not a sudden coup. It's an erosion of our Democracy.

Here's the blueprint they follow:

1. Capture the referees — Undermine independent institutions like courts, electoral bodies, and oversight agencies by filling them with loyalists who will bend rules in their favor.

2. Sideline the opposition — Use legal harassment, investigations, and bureaucratic obstacles to weaken political opponents without outright banning them. Make it harder for them to compete on equal footing.

3. Tilt the playing field — Manipulate media access, change electoral rules, and restrict voting rights to create systematic advantages while maintaining the appearance of democracy.

4. Normalize the abnormal — Flood the zone with so many controversies, crises, and norm violations that people become desensitized. What should be shocking becomes routine.

5. Exploit fatigue — Overwhelm citizens with chaos and constant battles so that outrage turns to exhaustion, and exhaustion turns to resignation. When people are too tired to fight, democracies crumble quietly.

Sound Familiar? All those boxes have been checked. The system counts on us getting tired. On the fire dimming. On us retreating into our private lives because the public battle feels endless.

But here's what they don't account for: joy as resistance. Community as armor. Anger as clarity. Minnesota showed us that. Bad Bunny reminded us of that. Even our tears…especially our tears are proof we haven't given up. 

This week's newsletter is a refusal to tire out. But we will also emphasize the need to fill your cup, tend to your inner garden, and find small, aligned ways to do what resonates for you. Because love is why we are here in the first place.

So we dance. We protect our neighbors. We allow ourselves to feel angry at injustice. And we remember: they need us to get tired. They need us to separate. They need us to hate.

We will not.

So, shall we get into it?

LET’S DIVE IN →

BUSINESS

Where Is Your Money Going? Why it might be time to audit your subscriptions

I've been sitting with something and I need to share it with you.

We talk a lot in this space about alignment—living in alignment with our values, our community, our purpose. But what about our subscriptions? What about the tools we use every single day, the ones we're paying $20 a month for without a second thought?

Here's what I came across recently: ICE is using ChatGPT-4 as part of its operations. A resume screening tool powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 was listed in the Department of Homeland Security's own AI inventory. And OpenAI president Greg Brockman donated $25 million to Trump's MAGA Inc. super PAC.

So when you pay for ChatGPT Plus, that money flows into a company whose leadership is financially entangled with the administration driving the deportations, the raids, the fear we've been watching unfold in our communities.

A grassroots movement called #QuitGPT has emerged around exactly this. Over 200,000 people have already signed up.

I'm not here to tell you what to do. But I am asking: have you ever felt like your everyday habits were quietly funding something you don't believe in?

If you're looking for alternatives, Claude (made by Anthropic, which has publicly stated it will not run ads) and Google's Gemini are both worth exploring.

Your subscription is a vote. Make sure it's going somewhere aligned.

HEALTH

5 Ways to Tend Your Heart Through Art

For centuries, physicians and artists have understood something essential: the heart is both a vital organ and a symbol of life, love, and emotion. A recent review in the American Heart Journal reveals how visual art—from Renaissance sketches to modern digital tools—has shaped our understanding of the heart and continues to play a healing role in cardiovascular care today. One of the lead authors, Dr. C. Michael Gibson, puts it simply: "The last three letters of heart are... art! Every heart carries art within it—the art of healing, hope, and humanity."

And right now, when the world asks us to stay vigilant, our hearts need tending. Here are five simple ways to use creativity as medicine—not escape, but grounding. Not avoidance, but healing.

1. Look at something real.
Find art that depicts the natural world—a landscape, a photograph of trees, an image of water. Research shows that viewing realistic art can actually lower your blood pressure. Let your eyes rest on something that reminds you the earth is still here, still beautiful, still worth protecting. Even five minutes counts.

2. Draw your heartbeat.
You don't need to be an artist. Put pen to paper and just... move. Scribbles. Shapes. Colors if you have them. The act of creating activates parts of your brain that words can't reach. Mindfulness-based art therapy reduces anxiety in people with heart disease—imagine what it can do when the disease is the world itself. Let your hand express what your mouth cannot.

3. Visit a space where art lives.
A gallery. A community mural. Even scrolling through an artist whose work moves you. Immersion in visual beauty interrupts the cortisol loop. It gives your nervous system permission to soften, just for a moment. And in that softness, you remember: you are more than your exhaustion.

4. Create with your hands.
Collage. Clay. Ripping magazine pages. Building something small. The tactile act of making slows your heart rate and brings you into your body. You are not just a mind analyzing the chaos—you are flesh and bone and breath. Making art reminds you of that.

5. Share something that moves you.
Send a poem to a friend. Post an image that gave you hope. Pin something to your wall that makes you feel less alone. Art is not meant to be hoarded—it's meant to circulate like blood through a body. When we share what heals us, we become part of each other's healing.

Your heart is not just a metaphor. It's muscle and chambers and electrical pulses keeping you alive through all of this. Tend it. Not because you're fragile, but because you're worth protecting.

LIFESTYLE

The Revolution Happening in Someone's Kitchen

I want you to imagine something with me for a second.

You walk into a neighbor's home. Not a restaurant. Not a café with Edison bulbs and a chalkboard menu. Someone's actual kitchen. There's a pot simmering on the stove. The air smells like garlic, cilantro, maybe something sweet baking in the oven. You sit at their table. They hand you a plate of food made with recipes passed down through generations—food that tastes like memory, like home, like love.

And it's completely legal.

In November 2024, LA County Public Health rolled out something quietly revolutionary: Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operations, or MEHKO. It's a program that lets home cooks get certified and operate their kitchens as legitimate businesses. No massive overhead. No commercial lease. Just good food, made by people who've been cooking it their whole lives, finally able to make a living from it.

Insert Granada Echo Park, which just opened last week using the program. A kitchen. A table. A meal that felt like being invited into someone's story.

This matters more than you might think.

For years, talented cooks—especially immigrants, single parents, and folks without access to capital—have been locked out of the food industry. Want to start a restaurant? You need tens of thousands of dollars. A commercial kitchen. Permits. Insurance. Legal fees. The barrier to entry has always been impossibly high for the people whose food we actually want to eat.

MEHKO flips that. It says: your kitchen counts. Your recipes matter. Your hustle deserves to be legitimized.

It's economic justice served on a plate.

And it's happening right now, in living rooms and backyards across LA County. People who've been selling food unofficially for years—at swap meets, through word of mouth, in Tupperware passed between friends—can now do it legally. They can advertise. They can grow. They can build something sustainable.

This is what resilience looks like when systems actually make space for it.

So yes, you can grab coffee from someone's home kitchen now. You can sit at their table. You can support their dream while it's still small enough to fit in a single room. And you can be part of a model that says: we don't all need to be corporations to matter.

If you're in LA County and want to learn more—or if you're a home cook ready to take the leap—find info on MEHKO permits at publichealth.lacounty.gov.

Because the revolution? It's simmering on someone's stove right now.

SOCIAL IMPACT

The Day the World Stops

I want you to imagine something with me.

No planes. No cars. No lights. No music. No work. No travel. Twenty-four hours of complete and total stillness—not as punishment, not as crisis, but as sacred practice.

On March 19th, the island of Bali will do what no other place on earth does: it will pull the plug. Nyepi, the Balinese Day of Silence, is a 24-hour ritual where the entire island goes dark. The airport closes. The streets empty. Even the internet shuts down. It is the only place in the world that closes its borders—not for war, not for disaster—but for silence.

And it is not a lockdown. It is a ritual.

The Balinese believe that evil spirits fly over the island on this day. By turning off every light and making no sound, they trick the demons into thinking Bali is deserted—and so the spirits leave it in peace. What looks like absence is actually protection. What looks like stillness is actually power.

The night before is the opposite. The streets erupt in noise and fire. Giant monster effigies called Ogoh-ogoh—elaborate, terrifying, magnificent—are paraded through the streets and burned, waking the spirits before the silence descends. The chaos comes first. Then the void.

And here's what gets me: when humans stop, nature restarts. In just one day—one single day without traffic and industry—greenhouse gas emissions on the island drop by 33%. The air clears. The ocean breathes. The birds get loud again. The whole ecosystem exhales.

One day. 33%.

We spend so much time asking what we can do. Nyepi asks a different question: What if we simply stopped?

There is something deeply spiritual about a culture that builds rest into its calendar not as luxury, but as law. That treats silence not as emptiness but as medicine. That understands the radical act of doing nothing—together—as a form of protection, of prayer, of collective care.

In a world that profits from our constant motion, choosing stillness is resistance.

You don't have to be in Bali. But on March 19th, consider what it might mean to honor the spirit of Nyepi wherever you are. Turn something off. Sit in the quiet. Let the demons think you've gone somewhere else.

Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is disappear—on our own terms.

SPIRITUALITY

The Only Place Power Lives: a reminder about presence

Here's the truth nobody says out loud: the systems we're fighting—the ones designed to exhaust, distract, and overwhelm us—they need you scattered. They need you doom-scrolling at midnight, half-present at dinner, anxious about a future you can't control and guilty about a past you can't change.

Your distraction is someone else's strategy.

Presence is how you opt out.

Not forever. Not perfectly. Just for this moment, right now—come back to your body, your breath, your actual life. That is where your power lives. Not in the spiral.

Try this today: the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique. When you feel the overwhelm creeping in, name 5 things you can see, 4 you can touch, 3 you can hear, 2 you can smell, 1 you can taste. It activates your senses, interrupts the anxiety loop, and pulls you back into your body. Science backs it—it's used in trauma therapy to regulate the nervous system.

They're counting on you burning out. They're counting on you giving up.

Show up present. That alone is an act of defiance.

TODAY’S MANTRA

What’s Upcoming

Happy Chinese New Year! We have officially entered the year of the Fire Horse. I, for one, am so excited to step into this firey energy, to slowly emerge out of winter hibernation for Spring in a few weeks, and to start to get the Regal Resilience mission more visible in 2026 with gatherings, new offerings, and more.

In the meantime, I hope you ring in the Chinese New Year with blessings, prosperity, and a whole lot of FIRE — whether that’s by wearing red, eating your favorite foods (perhaps Chinese!), or doing rituals to attract good fortune.

Con Mucho Amor,

Tanyette

Smart. Soulful. Aligned.